Gods and Monsters: Unclean Spirits (16 page)

“Sure. Dumuzi. Osiris. Ehh, Demeter, kinda. But none of them are around. That doesn’t necessarily preclude them, mind you. But I’d rather look local, first. Gods tend to shit where they eat. So. Here we are. God of death.”

“Nergal.”

“Mmyep.”

“Shit.”

“S
O WHAT NOW
?”

Tundu asks the question. Frank’s gone. Dropped off at his apartment above the falafel joint on South Street. It’s morning, now, officially. The streets filling with people walking to work—bankers, fry-cooks, baristas, black, white, immigrant.

“Go home,” Cason says. “Have a nice life.”

“So. Leave you to this, then.”

“Sounds about right, T.”

“Okay. Okay. I do that. I go home. I forget about all this.”

“Probably wise.”

“You be safe.”

Not likely
. “I will. Thanks.”

Tundu goes to shake his hand, but then holsters the gesture and goes in for a big hug instead. Cason feels like his bones are being pulverized in the bag that is his skin. The guy hugs like a bear trying to break a tree to get at the honey inside of it.

And that’s that. He drops Cason off there on South Street. The cab drives away and Cason fights the crowd coming out of the subway to head back to the hotel.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Director Of Traffic

A
H.
T
HERE SHE
is.

She sits inside the hospital room, the blinds half-turned so that she is hard to see, but not impossible. A child lays on the bed. Asleep. No—something else. Something beyond sleep. The woman is talking to someone: hard to see now, but when she moves, he sees that it’s another, different woman. Oh, but not so different. Same look. Heavier. Older. But same look. The woman’s mother.

As the little man watches, his smile is tight and pained. He does not want to intrude upon the conversation. Time is on his side, and the tumblers in the lock have not yet fallen into place. That’s okay. He chuckles, does a little dance over to a set of chairs near to the nurse’s station, and sits.

For a while he contemplates the many doors and hallways of a hospital. So many junctures and apertures. As many crossroads here as in a small city. Deeper, stranger junctures lurk, too—many roads crossing. Sickness and health. Strength and frailty. Hope and loss. Life and death.

He lets his mind wander through the many permutations.

Just to see.

While he waits, he pulls a few dried chili peppers from within his pocket—little red things, dry and crooked like the walking stick of an old, destitute man—and chews on them. The heat fills his mouth and he laughs quietly to himself.

A
N HOUR LATER,
the child’s mother emerges from the room.

As she passes him, the little man gets up, totters after. Others watch him, suspiciously. They are right to be suspicious, but for all the wrong reasons. They think the color of his skin is worrisome. They think it strange that he’s so small, and that he’s smiling like he is. They may not like the red and black beads clacking together around his neck, or the way he walks with such a light touch that none can hear, or the way that he sat there eating hot peppers, one after the other, seemingly produced from nowhere.

They are right to think him strange, yes. Even dangerous.

But not for those reasons.

The woman turns the corner. Choices, choices, always choices. So many hallways, so many doors. She could choose to leave the hospital and never return. Could steal medications and use them to push away the pain and sadness that flicker like the light of a lightning bug. She could fuck a doctor, overdose on pills, jump off the roof, run screaming through the halls.

But instead she goes to the snack machines. A cup of coffee from one. A baggy of Ritz crackers from the other.

Humans always make such boring choices.

That’s okay. That’s why he’s here. Eshu Elegba. Master of the crossroads.

She goes and sits, and he totters over, settles next to her.

He introduces himself.

“I am Shu,” he says. A nickname he likes.

She seems startled. As if he jostled her free from some reverie—or whatever reverie’s grim opposite shall be. She blinks, then forces a smile. “I’m... Alison.”

“Hospitals,” he says, shaking his head, clucking his tongue, but never losing his smile or the brightness in his eyes. “Difficult places.”

“Yes. They are.” She pops the tab on her coffee lid, blows in through the hole to cool the drink, with a thin whistle. “Are you here visiting a patient?”

“Visiting,” he says. “But not a patient.”

“Oh. A doctor?”

“No.”

“Do you work here...?”

“Yes,” he says, deciding to lie. Lies are good sometimes to get what you want, equal to truth in that way. Neither better nor worse than the other. Both a tool, each with different purpose, each a different weight in the hand. Lies are light and effortless—a scalpel. The truth is heavy, hard to lift—a mighty hammer.

A scalpel is necessary. For the moment.

“Oh.” She laughs, light, airy, but awkward. “I’m here for a patient. My son. He’s... in a coma. There was... an accident.”

So she knows the power of the scalpel, too. Though her deception is not as far from the truth as she thinks.

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” he says, never losing his smile. He can’t lose the smile. Well. He
can
. But it takes an effort equal to moving a mountain with a single finger—his smile is affixed to his face like paint on a wall, like skin on a skull. It’s because he’s so happy, of course. So happy just to be here. To be the cause of strife. And chaos. To be the rock in the stream that diverts the waters—diverts them always in an unexpected way. Waters run to strange places. If all of life did as you chose, if everything fell to a plan, what fun would that be? It would be no fun at all, and then his smile would truly go.

“The doctors don’t know what’s wrong.” Her voice creaks here like an old door. This was truth. Not a lie.

“You love him.”

“Of course.” Incredulous. “
Of course
. He’s my son.”

“Do not assume that all mothers love their sons. Yours is real. I can see that.”

“Oh. Well.” She sips the coffee. Wince. Still too hot. Steam rises from the cup, curling in the air like a winged sky-serpent twisting. “I just want him to be okay.”

“Yes. Absolutely. But something here is troubling you.”

She says nothing. Which is just another way of saying
yes
.

He continues: “His condition is a mystery and that concerns you. I see that. But I also see that you are troubled by other things. Events have lined up, one after the other, and too few of them make sense to you. Is that right?” He gives her no time to answer, allowing only for a tiny, fearful nod. His smile broadens as he speaks. “Things don’t seem to add up anymore. As if you glimpsed a world that, had anybody else told you existed, you would say they were mad. You would ease away from them, trying to be subtle but failing, thinking them dangerous or deluded.

“And now you worry it is you who has become dangerous or deluded, and yet, there, in that room, is your son. A son who won’t wake up. Who seems healthy except for the fact he is not precisely
with us
, either. You haven’t told the doctors the things you know yet, and part of you wonders if you should—maybe it’ll help, you tell yourself, but in your heart you know it cannot. How could it? They haven’t seen what you have seen. They don’t have a specialist for the problems you and your son are facing. And so you sit quietly hoping it was all a dream, even though hope does little to erase the truth from your mind, for hope is a dangerous thing. Hope, a mirage in the desert, a curtain of vapor forming for us an image of that which we most sincerely desire. Hope is not an oasis but rather, a trap.

“So let us instead look at the truth, heavy as it may fall upon us. The truth is that you have seen things you do not understand. The truth is that you have holes in your mind—memories cut from you like a child cut from a womb and kept from you, alive but somewhere far away. The truth is that your own child lies still, caught in a trap of magic that you have no way of defeating.”

She’s crying, now, tears running soft and silent down her cheeks. This is pain. This is truth. Gone is the scalpel. Time for the hammer-blow. His smile tightens, lips pinched together. Eyes, too. The face of a little old grandfather offering platitudes and comfort. But it is not comfort his words offer. Not yet.

“I have something for you. I don’t know how it helps you, but it does.” He unfolds a little piece of paper—hardly bigger than the fortune in a fortune cookie—and he presses it into her cold and clammy hand. “On that paper is an address. It is far from here. But if you drive there—begin your journey now, not later, but now—then you will begin to solve the problem you face, and you will find answers to your questions. Most importantly of all, you will fill those cavities inside your mind, and your memories will again return.” His smile widens—comically, impossibly, stretching almost ear to ear as his eyes pucker to the point of disappearing, as his ears grow and his chin lengthens and all his features seem to stretch out of proportion. “But you must go now. Leave your son and go.”

The woman holds the paper and unfurls it like a little banner, pinched between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. Her hands shake. Her lips, too. She sniffles. Blinks back tears. Sees an address handwritten there.

And then she stands, pockets the slip of paper. Picks up her coffee and crackers.

“I... have to go back to my son.”

“He will never wake up if you do. Go now. The door is closing.”

More tears.

With trembling hand, she gives him the coffee and the crackers.

Then she turns and goes down the hallway.

Not toward her son’s room, but away from it, keys jangling in her hands.

Oh, humans.

Once in a while they
do
make interesting choices.

Eshu Elegba chuckles and opens the crackers, happily munching between sips of too-hot coffee.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

How Death May Die

N
ERGAL.

Nirgali. Ner-uru-gal. The raging king. The furious one.

God of fire and storms and destruction.

God of death.

Not by choice, it seems.

Stories say that Nergal didn’t play well with others. When other gods were asked to kneel before the Skyfather, he did no such thing. He stood, defiant.

The punishment for the transgression? Death. He managed to escape the sentencing with the help of his demons—creatures of plague and lightning!—but the bounty was on his head and if the gods caught him, he would die.

Normally, the gods of the above could not descend into the underworld, and the opposite was true, too. But as Nergal was marked, he carried with him the stink of death and thus was allowed to descend into the Underworld to meet with its queen, Ereshkigal, in order to plead for his life and to have his coming death undone.

Before going, the god Ea instructed Nergal not to partake of any hospitality—no food, no drink. Don’t even sit in a
chair
. Just ask for the pardon and go.

But Nergal cared little for rules. His stubbornness was profound; an unending well of resistance. When someone told him to do something, he did its opposite, and so when Ereshkigal offered him her hospitality, he took it.

Hospitality is a tricky thing in the land of the gods. Eat of a place and it binds you to that place. Drink its water, sleep in its beds, it gets its claws into you.

That’s how Nergal became bound to the Underworld.

He went to escape death, and joined it instead.

It was then that Ereshkigal forced him to marry her. He was made to rule the place whose dominion was the very thing he hoped to elude.

At least, that’s how one story goes.

“F
IND ANYTHING
?”

Frank hovers. He smells of eucalyptus lip balm. His whole scarred-up face is greasy with the stuff. He says it “helps with the tightness,” which it very well may. It also makes him shine in the lights of the university library like a suckling pig hot out of the BBQ pit.

And he smells like an old woman.

Cason sits at the table, a kink in his neck ratcheting tension between his shoulders and head, sending a hard shiv into his brain. Before him, an advanced version of what he has back at the hotel room: books upon books upon books.

“No,” Cason says. Yawning. Rubbing his eyes. Needs more coffee. “I don’t even know what the hell we’re looking for. These books are all filled with... conflicting stories and academic write-ups. Half of them are translations. It makes my damn eyes bleed.”